niranjana feminism and cult stud.pdf

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Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia

Tejaswini Niranjana

Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

Cultural studies named as such in Asia came to prominence in the 1990s, and is today

poised to enter diverse institutional settings, from academia to publishing to the popular

culture industry. Here are some thoughts on the emergence of this interdisciplinary field,

with a focus on the implication of feminism in its beginnings.

In the South Asian context, the term feminism is selectively used. The more commonly

used terms are the Womens Question (in historical contexts) and the womens

movement (referring to more contemporary formations). Often a gender perspective,

especially as mediated through developmental discourse, has referred solely to a

womens (or womens studies) perspective.

I

The history of cultural studies in India, as it has been outlined over the last few years by

several scholars, is somewhat different from Western contexts, although it is similar to

Korea or Taiwan in the kind of legacies to which it can lay claim.iI speak here about the

feminist legacy, and about feminism as an intellectual-political project.

Glancing at the preoccupations of cultural studies in England might provide an interesting

starting-point. Two interruptions have been noted in British cultural studies in the

1970s, one created by debates around feminism, and the other around questions of race.

Stuart Hall has written about the way feminism broke andbroke into cultural studies: As

the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time,

crapped on the table of cultural studies. He adds that:We were opening the door to


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is emblematic of a system of representation that calls Indian culture into being. Here

the culture question is an intimate part of the formation of a national(ist) modernity, but

culture in modernity tends to be represented as something that remains outside of

modernity. This curious relationship between culture and modernity in the colonial

context may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place they do in

discussions about culture, when in the West for example the opposition, as Mary John has

pointed out, is indeed between women and culture, with women being placed in nature.iv

II

Although I have been referring specifically to the Indian situation, we might speculate on

the similarities with other Asian settings in relation to the feminist stakes in the culture

question. The stakes involve issues both of political as well as symbolic representation.

As Kumari Jayawardenes bookFeminism and Nationalism in the Third Worldargued

many years ago, feminism and nationalism in the non-West share a close relationship.v

On the other hand, the culture question also becomes a national culture question, with

serious consequences for women. So while nationalist movements enable womens

political participation, they also create for them a fixed position in national culture.

As in Japan or Korea or India, the New Woman and the Modern Woman were sought to

be differentiated, with the first privileged over the second.

A standard criticism of feminism across Asia derives from a charge that it is

disconnected/alienated from our culture. This is a charge that is seldom made against

any of our other political frameworks which are far from having a clearly identifiable

indigenous source. The implicit accusation seems to be that feminist demands are

modern demands, and modernization means the erasure or giving up of Indian culture and

the adoption of western values and ways of life. Why should this be a problem only for

women? What is the special connection of women with the culture question?

The answer should not be (as is usually put forward) to say that our culture oppresses

women, but to investigate how that idea of culture was put together. One of the starting


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points of this investigation would be to understand how narratives of the nation-in-the-

making were premised on the assertion of cultural difference from the West, with women

often represented as the embodiment of that difference. Nationalist discourse in the non-

Western world thus produces an antithetical relationship between modernity and culture

at the same time as it aligns women with the cultural and the authentic.vi

While the specific modalities of nationalist negotiations might differ, the broad contours

of the discursive moves that relegate women to culture in different kinds of colonial

conditions can appear startlingly similar in the non-West.

Starting in 2000, I was privileged to be part of a series of feminist discussions in different

Asian locations through the Inter-Asia Cultural studies conferences described below.vii

FUKUOKA, December 2000

A panel discussion on feminisms in Asia included presentations from four very different

locations. We talked about the question of gender in relation to the Communist state in

China, where gender difference was made invisible by state policy in the workplace. We

discussed issues around womens labour and sex work in the post-colonial situation of

Bangladesh; state feminism in Taiwan and the fraught history of the womens question in

a newly democratising society. The Sisters in Islam, a group of Malaysian women with a

distinct religious identity spoke about their engagement through law and media with the

state. The central question here seemed to be the often contentious relationship of women

with the state, although characterised in different ways.viii

BANGALORE (Feminisms in Asia conference), October 2001

This conference brought together Asian women who discussed women and the state (in

Iran and Singapore), womens engagement with civil war (in Sri Lanka), feminism and

religious identities (India, Malaysia), cultural minorities (India), queer citizenship (in

Taiwan and China), women and the law (Bangladesh, India). An important concluding

panel explored the critical vocabularies formulated by feminisms in Asia, and the

tensions of translation from Western contexts. We talked about the implicit burdens


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feminists carry if they own up to the name. Is this a specifically Asian burden, we asked.

What happens to feminisms political legitimacy if it is identified as alien and Western?

What narratives of cultural authenticity do feminists have to contend with and how?ix

BANGALORE (Alternatives Workshop), December 2001

Coming in the wake of the Feminisms conference, this workshop aimed at an assessment

of the political-theoretical ground on which we stand. In a key panel, we explored the

current dilemmas of feminists regarding contemporary political initiatives, and

investigated issues of cultural practice and feminist analysis.x

The discussion of feminist

politics was framed by the workshops concern with critiques of globalization (coming

from Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan), challenges to hegemonic nationalist formations

(Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka) from citizens groups or from initiatives foregrounding anti-

caste struggles.

SEOUL, July 2005

For women, what might it mean to see Asia as an inter-citational, inter-referential

discursive community, as Korean participant Kim Eunshil put it while discussing

feminist pedagogy and the institutionalization of feminist practices? While we all used

terms like gender, family, and patriarchy, the referents might be very different from each

other. The presentations on this panel I had organized at the Inter-Asia cultural studies

conference in Seoul made it abundantly clear that feminists in different locations even in

the same Asian region were confronting different sorts of phenomena.

In Bangladesh, for example, feminists are beginning to take popular culture seriously in

their attempt to understand Indian hegemony in the region; another concern for them is

the growing Islamization of the society and its consequences for women. In South Korea,

the sex-workers movement which feminists are arguing about supporting is leading to

the production of new subjectivities. Redefinitions of labour and womens work have

been sought by some feminists; sexual agency/violence/exploitation are other important

issues to be re-thought in this context; crucial questions are being raised as to whether all

womens migration is to be seen as sex-trafficking as suggested by international agencies.


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In Indonesia, where the term feminism has a class connotation and womens politics is

preferred by activists, there has been a critique of the authoritarian states economic

policies through the question of motherhood in the late 1990s. The seemingly progressive

processes of decentralization and democratisation are also producing new local

patriarchies. The religious identities of middle class young people in universities are

taking shape alongside the ubiquitous language of liberal feminism in the popular media.

Young feminists have to face women of their own generation to engage with mediatic

representations and show how their political questions are differently framed from those

circulating in popular cultural genres.xi

Bringing feminist issues into an Inter-Asia cultural studies frame has:

- foregrounded the culture question and the specific negotiations all women in Asia(and feminists in particular) undertake;

- opened up the question ofcolonial modernity/Asian modernities (including questionssuch as what is western about colonialism? Is colonialism only Western?);

- prompted an investigation into the problems oftranslation in relation to the formationof the vocabularies of social criticism;

- urged us to re-think thepolitical (what are our investments in the political? Is aseeming decline of interest in the political an indicator of a resignifying of politics in

our time?)

Feminists are major interlocutors in the debates around culture in all of these Asian

(and more broadly, non-western) spaces, engaging in a host of different campaigns and

initiatives. It is not surprising, then, that feminist political intervention and research has

fed directly into cultural studies.

III

In this section, I discuss the impact of feminist concerns on the disciplines in India, where

womens studies courses became the earliest location within the university for the


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studies syllabi. In art history, Geeta Kapur and Tapati Guha-Thakurta have written

insightfully on women artists; in sociology/anthropology Veena Das (on women and

cultural rights, and women and violence), Patricia Uberoi (on cinema, popular art), and

Sharmila Rege (on dalit women) have produced path-breaking analyses, as have womens

studies scholars like Mary John on feminist theory and the genealogies of womens

studies amidst the disciplines, or Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran on contemporary

legal/cultural-political issues.

In political science, we have the major study on Muslim women by Zoya Hasan and Ritu

Menon, and Nivedita Menon on politics and the law; in legal studies there is the wide-

ranging scholarship of Flavia Agnes, Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, Ratna Kapur, and

Madhu Kishwar; and in economics the pioneering work of Saradamoni, Govind Kelkar,

Bina Agarwal and Padmini Swaminathan. In the very different area of film studies and

cultural theory, there is the work of Lalita Gopalan, Shohini Ghosh, and Ranjani

Mazumdar among others, while in film-making there are a host of feminist directors such

as Deepa Dhanraj, Madhusree Dutta, Reena Mohan, and Paromita Vohra, just to mention

a few. In addition , there is a whole new generation of scholars in history, economics,

literary studies, legal studies and political science who are already publishing their work.

Some of these include Praveena Kodoth, J.Devika, Rekha Pappu, K.Srilata, Uma

Maheshwari B., P.Suneetha, Vasudha, Deeptha Achar, Jayasree Kalathil, Sharmila

Sreekumar and Anupama Roy.

The list, partial though it is, is a substantial one by any standards. The names mentioned

here are not simply there because they are academics who happen to be women, but

because they are involved in developing feminist perspectives on contemporary and

historical issues.

Now I turn my attention to the problem of gender in the cultural studies classroom, which

is a different proposition from talking culture in the womens studies classroom.


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In order to grapple with the pedagogic problem, we need to have a better understanding

of the relationship between feminism and modernity. The question that interests me in

particular is: what happens when we complicate our narratives of modernity, as cultural

studies has been doing? What sort of impact does this have on our feminist initiatives?

Although feminism has impacted the formulation of research problems in cultural studies,

we do not yet have a complex, multi-layered, multi-linguistic history of contemporary

feminism, whether in India or across Asia. What historiographical problems in relation to

claiming the past are we likely to encounter? Maybe it is now time to initiate systematic

reflection on this question, while acknowledging that the claim to feminism in the

cultural studies classroom by cultural studies students is made on much more uncertain

ground than in the womens studies classroom of the 1990s. An aside: in a local

university, the optional courses in the English Department are offered in such a way that

a student can do gender studies OR cultural studies but not both.

IV

From discussing the linkages between questions of cultural analysis and questions for

feminism in the classroom, I move to a brief account of what cultural studies has been

theorising in relation to gender, and what it might theorise in future.

In the 1990s, cultural theorists as well as feminists tried to theorise religious identity

questions (the demand for a Uniform Civil Code, the incorporation of women in right-

wing Hindu majoritarian politics); the caste question (the anti-Mandal, anti-lower caste

agitation, Dalit feminism); institutions such as the law, and the university. Now we

occupy a significantly reconfigured terrain in the early 21st

century. Our preoccupations

include sexualities, masculinity and the public sphere, conjugality, feminist

epistemology, and the exploration of the emergent possibilities for women in a

globalizing space. It is not as though the earlier questions have disappeared. However, the

ways in which they have been reconstituted onto newer terrain is something we have yet

to elaborate.


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Another area where feminists can contribute critical perspectives is pornography. In the

womens movement in the 1980s and 90s, groups often called for the banning or

withdrawal of films, hoardings and other visual representations considered degrading to

women. Today we are confronted with situations where the demand for banning produces

unanticipated effects. In the recent dance bar controversy in Mumbai, for example, we

saw that a Hindi films item number was not censored by the film certification

authorities, but a bar dancers performance of it was criticised, and used as the pretext for

shutting down dance bars. Feminists were divided over support to the bar dancers, with

issues of morality contending with those of labour. What did it really mean for feminists

when the Tamil filmNew wasrecently banned for obscenity because it narrated the story

of a young boy in an adult body; or when there was a nationwide call for controls over

new technology during the MMS scandal, where a schoolboy took pictures of himself

making love with his female classmate and transmitted it via MMS, starting a career for

the images on the internet? What is the work of censorship? How are women (and

feminists) implicated in this work? On whose behalf do we then speak? How are

questions of culture and of modernity being articulated in the censorship debates?

I would contend that today we need more ethnographic work, to enlarge our sense of

female lives, focussing for example on the relationship between women and popular

culture; or dealing with changing institutions like family and marriage. In literary studies,

there is still a prevalence of images of women criticism, a critique of which could lead

to greater focus on issues of representation. In visual culture studies and film studies too,

we need the development of stronger feminist research questions. In all these endeavours,

the Asian examples would help to enlarge our frames of reference, and enrich our

conceptual-theoretical resources.

My presentation has attempted to sketch the interconnections between cultural studies

and feminist critiques in non-Western contexts. My intention was not to say that all work

in cultural studies is inspired by feminism (nor would we want feminism or womens

studies to exhaust the field of culture). But tracing the short history of cultural studies as

an emergent critical arena in the non-West shows us the extent of the cultural studies debt


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to feminist scholarship and activism, to the way of asking a question which comes from

feminism; a way of holding scholarship to account, and a way of reminding us why we

do what we do; in short, the cultural studies debt to a history of passionate and engaged

scholarship.


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Notes

i See Niranjana, Sudhir and Dhareshwar (1993) and the special issue ofSeminar.ii Hall, Cultural studies and its Theoretical Legacies, p.282.iii An important reference point here is the establishment in 1995 of the annual Cultural Studies workshop

organized by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, which is open to research scholars and

junior faculty. The majority of participants are from India, although of late the workshop has had asignificant African, Latin American, and South-East Asian presence.iv John. Give ref.v Jayawardene. Give ref.vi

It is the narrative of the nation that stitches together women and tradition, women and national culture,making women emblematic of that which is uniquely Indian. The 19 th century reconstitution of Indian

tradition created distinctions between home and world, private and public, inner and outer. As new

patriarchies came into being, women increasingly took up the burden of maintaining the distinctiveness of

Indian culture, while men negotiated the worlds of commerce, higher education, and governance on termsset by colonialists. This is a quick overview of the impressive scholarship and arguments of Indian cultural

theorists and historians of the 19th century. For more detailed discussion, see among others Tharu and Lalita

( ), Chatterjee, Banerjee, Sarkar. In my own recent work (Niranjana 2006) on how Indian indentured

women in the Caribbean came to be disavowed by the nationalist discourse, I suggest that these women inthe subaltern diaspora function as the constitutive outside of the formation of normative Indian

femininity in India.

vii The Inter-Asia Cultural studies project is a critical enterprise spanning many regions in geographical

Asia, its mandate being to problematize the concept Asia even as it articulates the possibilities of

intellectual-political connections across that space. The loosely-knit group around this project meets every

year in different Asian locations to discuss and further their critical initiatives. One of these initiatives is a

journal, Inter-Asia Cultural studies, now published four times a year, and which is in its sixth year ofpublication.viii Thanks to Dai Jinhua, Ding Naifei, Firdous Azim, and Sisters in Islam for their presentations on the

Fukuoka panel.ix I am grateful to all the participants from different parts of Asia at this conference for their inputs.x At the Alternatives Workshop, the feminist contributions came from Kim Soyoung, Malathi de Alwis,

Samina Choonara and myself.xi I am indebted to Firdous Azim, Melani Budianta, Kim Eunshil and Go Kaphee for their contribution to

the panel I organized at the Inter-Asia Conference in Seoul, 2005.

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